The litter-sifting lifestyle: Capturing ant diversity on Middle American mountains

Fidel Vega, Saslaya National Park, Nicaragua, May 2011. Photo by Michael Branstetter.

By John Longino

MIGUEL! The shout echoes through the forest. It is dawn, in a cloud forest on an isolated group of mountains in eastern...

The challenge of modeling niches and distributions for data‐poor species

Optimal and default Maxent models for the Malagasy rodent Eliurus majori (logistic output). Results correspond to the unfiltered dataset (top) and filtered dataset (bottom), and three ways of determining model settings: AICc (left), sequential criteria based on...

Introduced megafauna are rewilding the Anthropocene

A wild donkey (Equus asinus) in the Sonoran Desert, Arizona. Photograph by Michael Lundgren.

Editor's Choice June

By Erick Lundgren et al. 

The world was once home to an astounding diversity of...

Wildfire–vegetation dynamics affect predictions of climate change impact on bird communities

Figure 1. Bird species assemblage were predicted using the spatially-explicit species assemblage modelling framework – SESAM – that applies successive filters to constrained predictions of richness and composition obtained by stacking species distribution models that...

Soil moisture matters

BEST POSTER AWARD

CLIMATE CHANGE BIOGEOGRAPHY 20-24 March Evora, Portugal

By Julia Kemppinen

What is soil moisture?

From an ecographical point of view, vegetation patterns are...

Body size decline with climate warming? Maybe not in temperate songbirds...

By Nicolas Dubos

Recent observation of decreases in the body size of endothermic animals lead to the proposal that body size decline is the third universal response to climate warming (after distribution range and phenological shifts). However, the mechanisms...

HOW THE HABITAT OF POLAR BEARS IS CHANGING

Photo: Karen Lone, Norsk Polarinstitutt​

By Karen Lone, Benjamin Merkel, Christian Lydersen, Kit M. Kovacs, Jon Aars

Polar bears use sea ice as a primary hunting habitat. Climate change is causing major declines in this unique habitat...

Rodents overlap less in their body size distributions in more diverse communities--could this hold a clue to explaining diversity patterns?

Juvenile Microtus pennsylvanicus, North Dakota

By Quentin Read

Ecologists have collected reams of field data, involving much sweat and toil, to explain how competing species — those with similar diets or habitat preferences —...

Clustering or network methods? Comparing different methods for bioregionalisation

Figure 1. Example of co-occurrence network based on presence data. a) Co-occurrence network with locations (green filled circles) and taxa (blue filled circles) and b) Binary matrix of species co-occurrences.​

By Francisco...

Forecasting range shifts of a cold-adapted species under climate change: Are genomic and ecological diversity within species crucial for future resilience?

By Spyros Theodoridis

Cold-adapted taxa are experiencing severe range shifts due to climate change and are expected to suffer a significant reduction of their climatically suitable habitats in the next few decades. However, it has been proposed...